This is the first update in a while, not because nothing has been happening, but because no great leaps forward were made on any Wednesday in the last few months, just steady progress – perhaps because it was just too hot! Well, we did get some stuff done on Wednesday and reached that critical tipping point where a website update was needed.

We will be at Sedgerail 2018 at Burnham-on-Sea with South Junction (SJ) in just over a week. The lighting rig for SJ was therefore removed ready for packing the rest of SJ and stock into its stillages this coming Wednesday. Picture shows the removed lighting rig.

On the subject of lighting, GasWorks (GW) has had its lights changed. The incandescent lights and controls have been retired after at least 20 years of use and extreme heat generation not least in the main plug.

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The new lights are programmable LEDs. The first slide shows the installation of the LEDs onto the original lighting rig. Once attached and connected up, Tim used his phone and showed some of the colours available – as seen in the next three slides. It seems that the green hue will be used when we simulate the aurora borealis. The final two slides show the effect of the red and blue hues with the super cool new lighting rig fitted on the layout. We just need to program several set colours into phone control to set various scenes on GW during exhibitions. We could even program in lightning effects which would also work well on The Summit – perhaps to be followed by rain effects?

The new Pecking Mill end baseboards of Evercreech New (EN) were joined up to enable dowels to be positioned. Discussions also took place as to transporting of the two large new baseboards – a caravan chassis was mooted. Hopefully the track-beds will be cut and ready for installation next Wednesday – but South Junction takes priority. We will need to take the front of The Summit (TS) down early in September to get EN attached to TS’s fiddle yard. Once that is done work on Heyno Junction can start again.

So lots of assistance needed in the next 2 weeks and lots of jobs to do! Please don’t be shy in coming forward to help.